had resolved to pass so that he could be a writer, rather than a Negro writer. His darker-skinned younger sister, Shirley, represented a possible snag, of course, but then he and Shirley had never been particularly close, and any- way she was busy with her own life and her own friends. (Shirley graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, and went on to marry Franklin Williams, who helped organize the Peace Corps and served as Ambassador to Ghana.) They had drifted apart: it was just a matter of drift- Ing farther apart. Besides, wasn't that why everybody came to New York-to run away from the con- fines of family, from places where people thought they knew who and what you were? Whose fam- ily wasn't in some way unsuitable;> In a Times column in 1979 Broyard wrote, "My mother and fa- ther were too folksy for me, too color- ful. . . . Eventually, I ran away to Green- wich Village, where no one had been Broyard with An b n B k ernays h in t h he fifties. Th ijì S l alie h nt th ng abo d ut hi d m. wasn't b f h that he was lac but t at e was beautl u, c armlng, an eru lte. orn 0 a mot er and father, where the people I met had sprung from their own brows, or from the pages of a bad novel. . . . Orphans of the avant-garde, we out- distanced our history and our human- ity." Like so much of what he wrote in this vein, it meant more than it said; like the modernist culture he loved, it had levels 68 I N the Village, where Broyard started a bookstore on Cornelia Street, the salient thing about him wasn't that he was black but that he was beautiful, charming, and erudite. In those days, the Village was crowded with ambi- tious and talented young writers and artists, and Broyard-known for calling men "Sport" and girls "Slim"-was never more at home. He could hang out at the San Remo bar with Dwight Macdonald and Delmore Schwartz, and with a younger set who yearned to be the next Macdonalds and the next Schwartzes. Vincent Livelli, a friend of Broyard's since Brooklyn College days, recalls, "Everybody was so brilliant around us-we kept duelling with each other. But he was the guy that set the pace in the Village." His con- versation sparkled-everybody said so. The sentences came out perfectly formed, festooned with the most apposite literary allusions. His high- beam charm could inspire worship t......" - " but also resentment. Livelli says, "Ana- tole had a sort of dancing attitude to- ward life-he'd dance away from you. He had people understand that he was brilliant and therefore you couldn't hold him if you weren't worthy of his . " attentIon. The novelist and editor Gordon Lish says, "Photographs don't suggest in any wise the enormous power he had in person. No part of him was ever for a moment at rest." He adds, "I adored him as a man. I mean, he was really in a league with Neal Cassady as a kind of presence." But there was, he says, a fundamental difference between Broyard and Kerouac's inspiration and muse: "Unlike Cassady, who was out of control, Anatole was exorbitantly in control. He was fastidious arout man- aging things." Except, perhaps, the sorts of things you're supposed to manage. His book- THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1'7, 1996 store provided him with entrée to Vil- lage intellectuals-and them with entrée to Anatole-yet it was not run as a business, exactly. Its offerings were few but choice: Céline, Kafka, other hard-to-find translations. The critic Richard Gilman, who was one of its patrons, recalls that Broyard had a hard time parting with the in- ventory: "He had these books on the shelf: and someone would want to buy one, and he would snatch it back." Around 1948, Broyard started to attract notice not merely for his charm, his looks, and his conversation but for his published wri t- ings. The early pieces, as often as not, were about a subject to which he had privi- leged access: blacks and black culture. Commentary, in his third appearance in its pages, dubbed him an "anatomist of the Negro per- sonality in a white world." But was he merely an anthro- pologist or was he a native informant? It wasn't an ambigu- ity that he was in any hurry to resolve. Still, if all criticism is a form of autobiography (as Oscar Wilde would have it), one might look to these pieces for clues to his preoccupations at the time. In a 1950 Commentary article entitled "Portrait of the Inauthentic Negro," he wrote that the Negro's embar- rassment over blackness should be banished by the realization that "thousands of Negroes with 'typ- ical' features are accepted as whites merely because of light complexion." He continued: - ...... ........-.. -- The inauthentic Negro is not only es- tranged from whites-he is also estranged from his own group and from himself Since his companions are a mirror in which he sees 0 himself as ugly, he must reject them; and since his own self is mainly a tension between an z accusation and a denial, he can hardly find it, much less live in it. . . . He is adrift without a role in a world predicated on roles. co <.I) A year later, in "Keep Cool, Man: